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Tao/History
}} History Tao was descended from a long line of pure blooded tiger therians, third in her family under two brothers. They were well off for their time, and dedicated to the arts as many of their ancestors had been. Her mother was a writer, a literary architect, crafting great literature and collections of poetry. Her father sang, and had once graced the stages of concert halls before settling down at the estate to raise his family. The eldest brother learned music from him and filled pages with compositions both vocal and instrumental. And the second brother became a master of paint and canvas, drawing forth worlds of color and light with his brush. And Tao? Well. Tao would have none of that. From even a young age she resisted everything her family tried to teach her. Music became a show of how loudly she could shout or bang on a drum. Art turned into a battle of thrown paint and how colorful she could render her instructor. Penmanship, an increasingly long list of insults and crass language - albeit in her best handwriting. If her tutor ever turned his back, he could expect to find an empty seat and open window when he returned. The only thing Tao seemed to enjoy was dance, but not the variety held at stately dinners with the other wealthy families - no, she liked the kind with stomping feet, clapping hands, and most importantly, a winner and a loser. She got in fights too, both with her brothers and children from visiting families. How anyone could stand to sit in those uncomfortable clothes without fidgeting and do nothing but listen while the grown-ups talked, she could never understand. Always, she managed to run away into the woods surrounding their estate, hop a fence, and put another stain or tear into yet another set of new finery. As she grew older, Tao learned to stay longer in the forest and diminish the amount of time she spent bound at home. She explored, and as she explored, she learned. She learned to stand in the stream until the fish nibbled her ankles and to snatch one out of the water with her claws. She learned how to snap sparks out of the aether into a dry pile of leaves for a cook fire. She learned how the animals moved in hidden trails through the underbrush, and how they rested, camouflaged, in sun-speckled shadows. She learned how the winds brought the weather and how to dig out an embankment for shelter in a storm. At first she could be gone for hours. When she reached her teens, she was gone for days. Then, she never came back at all. The drain on the world's aether was already felt among its citizens by then, and it began to show in the terrain as well. As Tao traveled, she found prey scarcer and foliage drier, and the little brooks she drank from grew muddy and shallow. Perplexed, she moved further out from the estate until she left the familiar woods behind and entered new territory. The withering only seemed to worsen. Surely it couldn't go that far, she reasoned, so she pressed on. Then the sparks she used to light her fire came less and less, and she realized something was wrong. Just a few miles away in an abandoned outpost, secluded from civilization, the sorcerer called Aegis felt it too, and was afraid. Despite unfairly taking and wasting aether for his dark magic with careless abandon, his life, and the life of every living thing, depended on the aetherflow, and he knew it. As he felt the drain taking hold of him over the months, he resolved to save himself. All his energy and magic, weak as it was, went into his research, his quest for a fix to his own mortality. In the cold undercroft of his small outpost, he devised a spell. Now, to test its effects. So far from any settlements or homesteads, though, where could he find a subject in time? Then fate delivered one to him. Tao found the outpost before long as she searched for an end to the land's blight. Being footsore and fatigued, the small ruin invited her to rest beneath its sturdy roof and safe walls, a pleasure she had not enjoyed for some weeks. Perhaps it was the lack of food she'd suffered, or maybe the aether drain she endured, but she entered the outpost with none of her usual wariness and set about making a camp. It was then Aegis struck. As she turned, a cold numbness gripped her limbs, spreading quickly through her body. Her eyes remained fixed, frozen, on the elf before her. He looked crestfallen. "Can you move at all?" he asked her. Tao longed to tell him what she would do to him if she could move, but of course, being completely encased in frost, she could not move, and therefore not speak. Nor could she blink, or look away, or even breath. Rage consumed her, but it did no good, and her life for the next immeasurable span of years became one monotonous day after another, with the sorcerer pacing before her, in and out of her field of vision, studying her and the effect of his spell. He had accomplished at least part of his goal, it seemed, as his captive did not age or wither over the years as the drought deepened. But unable to move or free oneself made the spell a failure, useless to him. He began anew, determined to preserve himself even if it meant the end of everyone else, and Tao could only watch him with ever-burning hatred. Then the day came when Aegis left the outpost and never returned, and Tao's endless fury, without a person to focus on, gave way to fog. In the fog, she found, she didn’t notice the time passing so much. And so she slept. Nothing is infinite, however. Without the sorcerer to sustain it, the spell, regardless of how strong the magic, began to degrade. The fog in Tao's mind cleared a little when she felt the change. The process was slow, agonizingly slow, a true test of her mental fortitude as she waited for the right moment. Years further must have passed by the time she felt the icy bonds become brittle. With a roar pulled from the darkest reaches of her tiger soul, Tao moved, and the ice shattered. She collapsed on legs that couldn’t remember how to stand and struggled to draw breath after forgetting how for three hundred years, years she had no idea had passed. Once she recovered, she wasted no time heading for home. How the land had changed! Life flourished where before it had crumbled, and she almost could not find her way back. Days passed, a week, two weeks, and at last she found the estate. But... not as she'd left it? A new fence, new faces, locks on doors, why were there so many people? The first tenant she grabbed gladly provided answers to her stumbling questions, and pointed her to the city that had not been there before, just beyond the tree line in what had been her forest. And so Tao came to the city lost as hell and barely speaking the right language, made up a sign that read "for hire", and stood at the gates from sun up to sundown hoping to earn some coin. The fire of vengeance still burned inside her, though, waiting to be unleashed upon the sorcerer called Aegis. Plot To be updated References }} Category:Subpages Category:Histories